"Hell, I'm fucked," said Mad discout ugg boots Sweeney. "Whatever. Thanks."
     Shadow walked back toward the town. It was 8:00 A.M. and Cairo was waking. He glanced back to the bridge and saw Sweeney's pale face, striped with tears and dirt, watching him go.
     It was the last time Shadow saw Mad Sweeney alive.
     The brief winter days leading up to Christmas were like moments of light between the winter darknesses, and they fled fast in the house of the dead.
     It was the twenty-third of December, and Jacquel and Ibis's played host to a wake for Lila Goodchild. Bustling women filled the kitchen with tubs and ugg boots on sale with saucepans, and with skillets and with Tupperware, and the deceased was laid out in her casket in the funeral home's front room with hothouse flowers around her. There was a table on the other side of the room laden high with coleslaw and beans and cornmeal hush puppies and chicken and ribs and black-eyed peas, and by midafternoon the house was filled with people weeping and laughing and shaking hands with the minister, everything being quietly organized and overseen by the sober-suited Messrs. Jacquel and Ibis. The burial would ugg boots for women be on the following morning.
     When the telephone in the hall rang (it was Bakelite and black and had an honest-to-goodness rotary dial on the front), Mr. Ibis answered. Then he took Shadow aside. "That was the police," he said. "Can you make a pickup?"
     "Sure."
     "Be discreet. Here." He wrote down an address on a slip of paper, then passed it to Shadow, who read the address, written in perfect copperplate handwriting, and then folded it up and put it in his pocket. "There'll be a police car," Ibis added.
     Shadow went out cheap uggs online back and got the hearse. Both Mr. Jacquel and Mr. Ibis had made a point, individually, of explaining that, really, the hearse should only be used for funerals, and they had a van that they used to collect bodies, but the van was being repaired, had been for three weeks now, and could he be very careful with the hearse? Shadow drove carefully down the street. The snowplows had cleaned the roads by now, but he was comfortable driving slowly. It seemed right to go slow in a hearse, although uggs discount he could barely remember the last time he had seen a hearse on the streets. Death had vanished from the streets of America, thought Shadow; now it happened in hospital rooms and in ambulances. We must not startle the living, thought Shadow. Mr. Ibis had told him that they move the dead about in some hospitals on the lower level of apparently empty covered gurneys, the deceased traveling their own paths in their own covered ways.